


Selfishness Is A Weapon

by orphan_account



Series: Episode Tags [5]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, basically the characters' canonical backstories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 04:17:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18542107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Power means something very different to people who haven't always had it.





	Selfishness Is A Weapon

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a reference to a Terry Pratchett quote.

Daenerys has her mother’s smile. Viserys told her often, in love and in anger, his smile soft and sad, bitter and mocking by turns. He told her as the rain lashed down on them where they sat crouched in the meager shelter of a doorway. He told her with while she sobbed and clutched her bruising cheek, this one truth offered up like an apology.

 

Ser Barristan told her what her father did to her mother. The few words he spoke seemed to burn his mouth, but Daenerys remembered Drogo’s rough hands on her hips and understood more than her perhaps meant her to.

 

If her mother had owned a dragon, Aerys would never have touched her. If she had cracked open the eggs at her wedding, she would have roasted her groom like a horse’s liver and devoured him whole.

 

Learned men say that good rulers do not seek power, but learned men have never been draped in silks and sold to the highest bidder. She loves Jon. She will fight for the North. The first is for herself, and the second is her duty, and all the sour old men in Winterfell cannot daunt her. But her dragons, her bloodline, the titles she has forged for herself–these are, in the end, the only thing standing between her and becoming property once again.

 

\---

 

In her weaker moments, Sansa wishes she were a little girl again. She misses her parents, of course, but she is old enough now to acknowledge that she almost misses her illusions more. Silk and sewing, pretty girls with flowers in their hair and knights who are always, always true – the Sansa-that-was would have sighed over the tale of a Northern king who threw away his crown for love.

 

Arya has taken to crawling into bed with her. That, at least, hasn’t changed. Just as when they were children, she refuses to admit that she’s having nightmares, and Sansa does her the courtesy of not pressing her further. Arya, in turn, shakes Sansa awake from dreams of icy water and Petyr’s hand on her cheek.

 

“They’re dead,” she says the night after Jon comes home, rough and too loud into the darkness. “They’re dead and you’re not.”

 

Sansa nods. Arya’s wiry arms wrap around her middle and squeeze tight, and Sansa squeezes back.

 

“Neither are you,” she says.

 

Arya sounds sad. “You don’t know that.”

 

“But I do,” Sansa says.“You’re too annoying to die.”

 

They laugh. Winterfell closes around them, safe and warm and _theirs_. Another illusion, in the end. Jon has bent the knee, and the White Walkers are marching south. Nothing is truly safe, but Sansa will keep the cold away until it takes her in turn. The songs have gone, and so too the summer, but duty remains.

 

Their father, she thinks, with a smile that is love and anger both, would be very proud indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm extremely salty about how the showrunners are framing their female characters, basically.


End file.
